when it first came out I was skeptical of their claims they wouldn’t replace people with it, because what company wouldn’t replace a person with a bot.

as it became apparent that not only was my original mistrust of them appropriate, but that they were literally breaking laws to build it, my dislike solidified into loathing.

then they began to force the use of it through companies, selling it as a product that can improve productivity while studies had proven the claims as false. my loathing precipitated to hatred when people started losing their jobs for not using it or just being replaced by it.

finally when my government began to use it to kill and oppress, my feelings about AI changed into those of active rebellion.

now, when faced with interacting with AI at work I perform as an idiot. I pretend I don’t understand how to use the tools, or how to set them up. I pretend that I don’t understand what the slop means that someone just vomited up in chat. I pretend that I am such a useless idiot that the only way to help is by personally interacting with me.

weaponized incompetence is a fine line to walk, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years.

so yeah, fuck AI, fuck LLMs, fuck anyone who willingly supports fascist tools.

It’s a tech.

Do I hate JavaScript for what it has done to the web? No, I hate people who use JavaScript in their webpages with evil intent.

I have a mentality and way of seeing things that doesn’t really allow me to hate a technology.

That being said, I really dislike all the AI content that people put online. Searching anything has become a pain. And the amount of webpages that are AI written is outrageous.

Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let’s start with the story time.

I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn’t even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.

Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.

Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn’t about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn’t underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don’t want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.

And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I’m not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can’t fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I’m stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.

One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I’m writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I’ve made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more… professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.

Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I’m pretty sure ads won’t cut it this time so I’m really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.

it has rotten peoples brains to the point they cant function without asking it to hallucinate more.

Started like you. Fascinated by the reponses i was getting from the LLMs. Then started to notice hallucinations, read.up a bit, and deduced its a fundamental flaw of the approach they use. Its not.going to ‘get better’, because as i said, its fundamental to the methodology.

Nowadays, its a nice conversation piece, or a natural language interface to search. Not worth the investment.

Given my background in CS though, i still believe in traditional ai methods and wish the funding went into that instead. Some specialized ais, e.g. medical imaging are pretty good. Others are glorified brute force or hueristic filtering of large data sets. Not those.

There are some good uses, but that is outweighed by the vast amount of problems it is causing and will continue to cause as generations are raised with it existing from their birth.

I have a dirt cheap VPS running about 30 or so services all made by AI. They automate lots of meanial tasks and help me save money.

Tasks I would never care to do, can now be done for me. It’s a suboptimizers wet dream. The cost of personally tailored software is now really low.

I want my job security back!

But yeah, I get it. LLMs and image gen was hella fascinating at first. No shame in greeting something new with curiosity.

It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI can be used to quickly find solutions to problems you might not have been able to solve and I’ve heard that AI can be used in some cases to help people who are disabled. I’ve been using free AI services occasionally for personal use and they can be pretty good for the most part, sometimes it seems like the AI knows exactly what I want while other times, it either seems to ignore part of my prompt or just have no idea what I need from it.

On the other hand, people are losing their jobs, it’s destroying the economy, people have already used it to spread misinformation and malware, it’s being used both to create and to promote scams, it’s possibly damaging the environment with all the water the data centers use, they’re all trained off of stolen data, and there’s probably a lot of other issues that I’m either forgetting or just not aware of.

All in all, it’s hard to promote the use of AI but I understand it’s usefulness. I will never pay for an AI service and when I use the free ones, I always use them with an ad-blocker so they don’t get any monetization from my usage.

I mostly don’t care and as much as people flip out about it I odn’t think it’s any more relevant than, VIRTUAL REALITY, or BIG DATA or a BLOCKCHAIN.

or any of the other hype machines that come around every couple of years and then fizzle out into nothingness.

It has its uses. It’s just ruined by the bad apples of people who’ve long have had malicious intent where if you put anything that was intended for a good purpose in front of them, they’d ruin that for everyone.

For example, when there are things I do not know about like objects, I can take a picture of it, direct and show ChatGPT by asking what it is and it’ll tell me. It’s convenient to talk to an LLM to understand phrases, slang, slurs and their history about them in real time. I also have enjoyed using it to fix and enhance images that my phone’s piss-poor autofocus fucks up on with some images.

I think what really ruins AI is that, select people and companies are way too heavily reliant. It is not a solve-everything tool. It is not something you go to about everything, like mental therapy. It is not something you should be using to cheat on homework, to have it help you with getting by in colleges and school that rely on your own problem solving skills to navigate.

Generative AI can get fucked. I’ll never use it.

The “AI” tools that are used for stuff like folding proteins and other beneficial work like that get a pass. Everything else should be relegated to the wastebin of history just like Facebook/Insta/Twitter, etc…

I think the technology is cool and holds a lot of promise in certain niches. I’ve been into it since 2019 and learned a lot just watching it evolve.

That said, I’m skeptical and I think some folks rely on it too much. I work with someone who just copy/pastes Claude on every response. You have to do your own thinking and you have to double check everything it outputs. It follows direction, but it doesn’t hesitate to make incorrect assumptions and inferences, and often the things you tell it isn’t what it does.

I saw an AI guy explaining some prompt technique where you tell the AI to ask questions until it is 95% certain what you want it to do, but it doesn’t have certainty and it can’t achieve 95% of something it doesn’t have, so it asks questions — sometimes pointless ones — until it has performed the ceremony of achieving 95% certainty. And I suppose maybe that that ceremony does help in some cases, but it’s not doing what you tell it to do.

AI has a lot to offer. Sometimes when I ask it to write code, it does so using libraries and annotations I wasn’t aware existed. I learn about things that way. It writes cleaner code faster than I do because it doesn’t hesitate and overthink. But everyone knows about the hallucination issues. And you have to make your instructions as narrowly scoped and unambiguous as possible — approaching the complexity of code.

I get frustrated because I am a believer in AI, but I’m surrounded by people who don’t seem to know how to use it appropriately and it’s frustrating. Skepticism and critical thinking is crucial to successful use of AI, otherwise you’re going to be caught with your pants down, having relied on it to do your thinking for you, and suddenly you realize you don’t understand the very thing you’ve supposedly done.

Generative AI will completely die out, it’s only a matter of time. And, it will happen sooner than later.